If you are a lover of all-things remote-conteolled, it’s likely that you know a thing or two about controllers. You’ll have one or two of the things, both the familiar two-joystick type and the pistol-grip variety. But had you ever considered that there m ight be another means to do it? [Andrei] over at ELECTRONOOBS has posted a guide to a tilt-controlled RC car. It is a good example of how simple parts can be linked together to make something novel and entertaining, and a great starter project for an aspiring hacker.

An Arduino Nano reads from an accelerometer over an I2C bus, and sends commands over a wireless link, courtesy of a pair of HC-12 wireless modules.  Another Nano mounted to the car decodes the commands, and uses a pair of H-bridges, which we’ve covered in detail, to control the motors.

The tutorial is well done, and includes details on the hardware and all the code you need to get rolling.  Check out the build and demo video after the break.

We’d love to see this idea turned up to 11 by using a more capable base vehicle, and finer controls on the steering– A Honda Civic perhaps?

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

Building your own robot is something everyone should do, and [Ahmed] has already built a few robots designed to be driven around indoors. An indoor robot is easy, though: you have flat surfaces to roll around on, and the worst-case scenario you have a staircase to worry about. An outdoor robot is something else entirely, which makes this project so spectacular. It’s the M1 Rover, an unmanned ground vehicle, built around the Arduino platform.

The design goal of the M1 Rover isn’t just to be a remote-controlled car that can be driven around indoors. This robot is meant for rough terrain, and is a robot that can be programmed, can also be driven around by a computer, a video game controller, or custom joysticks.

To this end, the M1 rover is designed around high-quality laser cut plywood, powered by a few DC motors controlled through a dual H-bridge, and loaded up with sensors, including a front-mounted ultrasonic sensor. All the electronics are tucked away in the chassis, and the software is just fantastic. In fact, with the addition of a smartphone skillfully mounted to the top of the chassis, this little robot can became an autonomous rover, complete with a webcam. It’s one of the better robotic rover projects we’ve seen, and amazing addition to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

You’re constantly poking and prodding your smartphone throughout the day, but have you ever wondered what would happen if this little computer could poke back? Well now that’s actually possible, with the MobiLimb accessory by Marc Teyssier and a team stretching across two universities in France.

The device uses an Arduino to interface with the phone or other smart device via its micro USB port, and powers a servo-actuated robotic manipulator with five degrees of freedom. The servos give the artificial finger enough power to pull the phone itself across the ground, and for other interactions like acting as a physical avatar, propping the phone up as a stand, or even taking input as a joystick apparatus.

MobiLimb is a new shape-changing component with a compact form factor that can be deployed on mobile devices. It is a small 5 DoF serial robotic manipulator that can be easily added to (or removed from) existing mobile devices (smartphone, tablet). In the spirit of human augmentation, which aims at overcoming human body limitations by using robotic devices, our approach aims at overcoming mobile device limitations (static, passive, motionless) by using a robotic limb.

This approach preserves the form factor of mobile devices and the efficiency of their I/O capabilities while introducing new ones:

• The users can manipulate and deform the robotic device (input)
• They can see and feel it (visual and haptic feedback), including when its shape is dynamically modified by the mobile device.
• As a robotic manipulator, it can support additional modular elements (LED, shells, proximity sensors).

More info is available in Teyssier’s write-up, and you can see it in action in the video below.

At Jason Poel Smith’s local pediatrician’s office, they have a variety of movie posters and displays to help make the environment more welcoming to kids. The most popular of them all is a huge inflatable Baymax robot character from the Disney movie Big Hero 6. 

While a beautiful display, Smith decided that what would make it even better is if it could talk, and went to work adding this functionality with an Arduino Uno, an MP3 shield, and a very large button. 

Now when kids arrive, they can hit the button to hear Baymax welcome them to the office as their “personal healthcare companion” via a pair of powered speakers. 

Arduino code and more info is available here, if you’d like to build something similar!

When piloting a vehicle remotely, it’s only natural to tilt your controller one way or the other to “help” guide it in the right direction. While usually this has no effect whatsoever, YouTuber Electronoobs decided to take this concept and run with it, creating a remote control transmitter that responds to an onboard MPU-6050 inertial measurement unit.

The transmitter’s Arduino Nano takes movement data, and sends the corresponding signals to a custom receiver board on the RC car via a pair of HC-12 wireless modules. A second Arduino mounted in the car then commands the vehicle’s DC motors with the help of an H-bridge. 

This is a radio controller that has 2 analog channels and the data is out from a MPU-6050 gyro module. So, we could control a toy car for example just by rotating the controller. I usually use the nRF24 module, but in this project I also want to show you how to use the HC-12 module. You will learn how to get the IMU data, how to use the HC-12 radio connection and how to control 2 DC motors using PWM signals and an H-bridge.

It’s quite a versatile build, and it can even be set up to output PWM signals if you need to interface with more advanced electronics.

Earlier this year, Distrelec launched an Automation & Robotics Contest that invited our community to help advance Industry 4.0 leveraging the Arduino ecosystem. Submissions were required to use Arduino hardware—ranging from WiFi (MKR1000 and Yún Rev2) to GSM/narrowband (MKR FOX 1200, MKR WAN 1300, and MKR GSM 1400) to feature-rich boards like the popular Mega and Due—along with Arduino Create to set up, control, and connect their devices.

Fast forward five months and the winning entries have now been selected, with the top project receiving a Keithley DMM6500 Bench Top Multimeter and a trip to Maker Faire Rome to showcase their work. Other prizes included a Weller WT1010 Set (2nd place) and Grove Starter Kits for Arduino (3rd-10th).

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the winners!

1st Place: Arduino Data Glasses for My Multimeter

2nd Place: Industrial Line Follower for Supplying Materials

Runner-Up: Accessibility Controls for Droids

Runner-Up: Skating Robot  

Runner-Up: Autonomous Home Assistant Robot

Runner-Up: Object Avoiding FSM Robot Arm

Runner-Up: Automatic Monorail Control

Runner-Up: Smart Crops: Implementing IoT in Conventional Agriculture

Runner-Up: Building a Sensor Network for an 18th Century Gristmill

Runner-Up: Robot Arm Controlled Through Ethernet

Congratulations to everyone! Be sure to also check out the contest page to browse through several other projects, such as an IoT platform for vehicles, a universal CNC machine, a gesture-controlled robotic arm, and more!

Maker Thomas Meston needed a “mysterious looking device” that allows players to enter codes obtained via an original party game. What he came up with is entitled “Dr. Hallard’s Dream Transmission Box,” and consists of an Arduino, a party light, a smoke machine, and other components stuffed into a broken National NC-33 ham radio.

This radio makes a really excellent enclosure for the electronics inside, and when the device is properly activated the winning team hears a special message via an Arduino Uno-controlled MP3 shield, accompanied by laser lights and smoke. 

How it works:

• When the box is switched on you hear static and see a yellow light. The device is ready for the codes to be entered.
• Once all three dials have been set, the player switches the bottom toggle to “send” state, the box will message back whether team blue or team red has entered any codes with a quick flash of either a red or blue led.
• If all three dials are set to red codes, the red team wins and hears a special message through the speaker just for them. The laser lights and smoke machine will be activated at the same time.
• If all three dials are set to blue, a different message will play as well as activating the smoke machine and laser lights.

More info on the project can be found here, and while it might seem like a shame to modify this kind of vintage equipment, Meston notes that he sees this as giving it a nice second life since it was previously non-functional.

We’ve seen [Johan]’s AA-battery-sized Arduino/battery crossover before, but soon (we hope!) there will be a new version with more MIPS in the same unique form factor! The original Aarduino adhered to classic Arduino part choices and was designed to run as the third “cell” in a 3 cell battery holder to relay temperature readings via a HopeRF RFM69CW. But as [Johan] noticed, it turns out that ARM development tools are cheap now. In some cases very cheap and very open source. So why not update an outstanding design to something with a little more horsepower?

The Aarduino Zero uses the same big PTH battery terminals and follows the same pattern as the original design; the user sticks it in a battery holder for power and it uses an RFM69CW for wireless communication. But now the core is an STM32L052, a neat low power Cortex-M0+ with a little EEPROM onboard. [Johan] has also added a medium size serial flash to facilitate offline data logging or OTA firmware update. Plus there’s a slick new test fixture to go along with it all.

So how do you get one? Well… that’s the rub. It looks like when this was originally posted at the end of 2017 [Johan] was planning to launch a Crowd Supply campaign that hasn’t quite materialized yet. Until that launches the software sources for the Zero are available, and there are always the sources from the original Aarduino to check out.

It’s ridiculously easy to lay hands on a cheap DC-to-AC inverter these days. They’re in just about every discount or variety store and let you magically plug in mains powered devices where no outlets exist. Need 120- or 240-VAC in your car? No problem – a little unit that plugs into the lighter socket is available for a few bucks.

So are these commodity items worth building yourself? Probably not as [GreatScott!] explains, but learning how they work and what their limitations are will probably help your designs. The cheapest and most common inverters have modified square wave outputs, which yield a waveform that’s good enough for most electronics and avoids the extra expense of producing a pure sinusoidal output. He explains that the waveform is just a square wave with a slight delay at the zero-crossing points to achieve the stepped pattern, and shows a simple H-bridge circuit to produce it. He chose to drive the output section with an Arduino, to easily produce the zero-crossing delay. He uses this low-voltage inverter to demonstrate how much more complicated the design needs to get to overcome the spikes caused by inductive loads and the lack of feedback from the output.

Bottom line: it’s nice to know how inverters work, but some things are better bought than built. That won’t stop people from building them, of course, and knowing what you’re doing in this field has been worth big bucks in the past.

Some legged robots end up moving with ponderous deliberation, or wavering in unstable-looking jerks. A few unfortunates manage to do both at once. [MusaW]’s 3D Printed Quadruped Robot, on the other hand, moves in rapid motions that manage to look sharp and insect-like instead of unstable. Based on an earlier design he made for a 3D printable quadruped frame, [MusaW] has now released this step-by-step guide for building your own version. All that’s needed is the STL files and roughly $50 in parts from the usual Chinese resellers to have the makings of a great weekend project.

The robot uses twelve SG90 servos and an Arduino nano with a servo driver board to control them all, but there’s one additional feature: Wi-Fi control is provided thanks to a Wemos D1 Mini (which uses an ESP-8266EX) acting as a wireless access point to serve up a simple web interface through which the robot can be controlled with any web browser.

Embedded below is a brief video. The first half is assembly, and the second half demonstrates the robot’s fast, sharp movements.

We love it when robots show some personality, like this adorable little quadruped robot that can make small jumps.

Thanks to [Baldpower] for the tip!